Guest essay by Eric Worrall
More evidence that global warming is spreading its icy tentacles across the entire Northern Hemisphere; devex reports that global warming is freezing Mongolian livestock, and preventing the grass from growing in the Summer.
For Mongolians, climate change is as personal as it gets
When the world adopted the newest climate agreement during the United Nations climate change conference — or COP21 — in Paris, France, last December, an urgent warning was sounded: The effects of climate change will only worsen if nothing is done to address the problem.
…
Even in the landlocked nation of Mongolia, the negative effects of climate change have hit home — quite literally. Oyun Sanjaasuren, inaugural president of the United Nations Environment Assembly, said that her country’s vulnerability to climate change could be the highest in the world by the turn of the century, if current rate of temperature increase continues.
“Mongolia’s average warming over the past couple of years is 2.2 degrees Celsius, which is considered the hottest in the country since the 1940s, and the global average is at 0.8 degrees Celsius,” said Sanjaasuren, who has also served as a member of parliament in the East Asian nation since 1998.
The effects of climate change have been severe in Mongolia, bordered by Russia to the north and China to the south. In 2009 and 2010 alone, around 8.5 million livestock died — consisting mostly of goats, sheep, cows and horses — as a result of extreme weather conditions known as a “dzud,” a summer drought followed by a heavy snowfall.
The phenomenon is unique to the East Asian nation, exacerbated by the fact that around one-third of the country’s work force depends on animal husbandry and livestock herding to earn a living. And this year, dzud is once again threatening livelihoods.
Since November 2015, large parts of the country have been experiencing very low temperatures of up to minus 40 degree Celsius, followed by heavy snowfall that has covered around 90 percent of Mongolia’s territory. This has resulted in sharp reductions in plant life used for livestock feed and rendering pastures — and even basic services such as transportation — largely inaccessible.
…
“Herders and livestock were used to warmer winters … so now with colder winters, it makes it hard to cope with the temperature,” Tsedensednom, governor of Ulziit district, located more than 600 kilometers southwest of the capital city of Ulaanbaatar, told Devex.
“I’m not a scientific expert, but in my personal experience, the changes [to the environment] are evident,” he added. “When I was a kid, the grass was so high you couldn’t see calves. Now grass only grows 10 centimeters, or not at all.”
This situation has been exacerbated by overgrazing, an issue in the country for several years. …
Read more: https://www.devex.com/news/for-mongolians-climate-change-is-as-personal-as-it-gets-87832
The harsh conditions are obviously no laughing matter for the Mongolian people, who are obviously suffering severe hardship, but the attempt to frame this as a problem caused by warming is more than a little ridiculous. Still, perhaps Mongolian authorities are taking their lead from US Climate Scientists, who frequently claim brutal cold and heavy snow are our fault.
..Eric, what is really pathetic, is that these fools actually believe that the majority of civilized \ educated Humans will accept their foolish stupidity without doing any research of their own !
The majority of western adult humans HAVE accepted this foolish reality, or at least, accepted it enough to continue electing governments who push “green” policies.
This article simply shouts out just how much of a “DZUD” global warming theory really is
There is a very good scientific study of the dzud looking at the 1993 period onwards
https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/85158/Nina%20S_thesis_061211.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
The worst dzud in recent Years appears to have been 1944/45 and the event seems to be a very frequent occurence.it was made worse by a great upsurge in livestock with subsequent overgrazing. Difficult to see the agw connection but easy to sympathise with the people affected.
Tonyb
If there is a common name for this occurrence in the vocabulary it must be quite common.
The worst dzud in recent Years appears to have been 1944/45
That would be the last time that the AMO started its downturn.
Just more warmista loss of effective intelligence (h/t Kevin Lohse) where they are bright, keen, and committed but totally clueless.
Marcus, the majority of ‘civilized/educated humans’ DON’T do any research of their own, and when the media reports that “scientists say”, they accept it as gospel truth.
Send in John Kerry pronto.
..Why ??, Do you want to make another terrorist Happy ?
He deserves to get frostbite, along with John Holdren.
..You are being waaaaay too nice !
Don’t send Al Gore there though, it would be difficult to separate out the Gore Effect from Normal Fluctuations
AGW for global heating
AGW for global cooling
AGW for shrinking glaciers
AGW for increasing antarctic ice pack
AGW for health problems
AGW for increased farm yields
A most amazing thing, AGW.
No warming in 58 years!
http://realclimatescience.com/2016/03/noaa-radiosonde-data-shows-no-warming-for-58-years/
Surely they are not properly adjusted.
Quote ” The phenomenon is unique to the East Asian nation, exacerbated by the fact that around one-third of the country’s work force depends on animal husbandry and livestock herding to earn a living. And this year, dzud is once again threatening livelihoods. “… So, it has happened before ? It’s called NATURE , which is a beast we will never tame !
So common they have a word for it .
Bob Armstrong
March 7, 2016 at 10:34 am
============
Bob, your eight (8) word comment will be difficult to argue against.
… syllable
Marcus
I stand by my comment. You are off by one syllable.
syllable or silly-bull
My thought exactly!
I still can’t tell the difference between Global Cooling caused by Global Warming and Global Cooling caused by Global Cooling.
..Dear Margaret, it’s quite simple…Poor countries that are controlled by dictators claim Global cooling is caused by Glo.Bull warming, thus, they get money from the evil Americans…Northern Canadians, such as myself, just want Glo.Bull Warming to be real, so I can stop freezing my nookies off !
Mongolia has a vibrant democracy and different parties have been elected from time to time. It is being hammered by the drop in the price of commodities (coal and copper) and of course, resurgent cold.
It is now quite a bit warmer in the capital than it was 60 years ago, but the record low was set only 15 years ago: -53 C (in the city).
The brutal cold has been there since the Little Ice Age. It was much warmer in the time of Chingis Khan.
Believe it or not the EU gave Mongolia 50 windmills to help generate power. They are under the flight path from Beijing to the east of Ulaanbaatar. Mongolia has a billion tons of coal. They also have the cleanest burning coal stoves available. All they have to do is build more of them.
It is sad that this natural calamity which occurs from time to time is being blamed on human CO2 emissions.
..Crispin, thanx for the update, where ever you are today !
I read that the street kids live in the sewers to keep from freezing. The article says they sometimes freeze to death during summer cold snaps. Harsh.
Crispin,
Somewhat OT, but every time you comment, I get a lesson in world geography trying to figure out where you are.
Yep you are correct commieBob. If you are out after dark you need to be very careful of the missing manhole covers
Commiebob
“I read that the street kids live in the sewers to keep from freezing. The article says they sometimes freeze to death during summer cold snaps. Harsh.”
This is one of the urban legends (literally) that serve to show that biased reporting is not limited to the halls of the Beeb.
They are not ‘living in the sewers’! There is a CHP (central heating and power) plant in the city (two, soon) that have gigantic pipes running from the power station into the city centre to heat all the buildings. They run through their own underground passages once they near the city centre. They are above ground on the outskirts.
The people ‘living underground’ are living in the warm tunnels through which these hot water pipe pass. They are not sewers. Many of the manhole covers are missing and people just pop down them as a way to escape the cold. I understand there are several hundred people down there on cold nights.
Darn. I had visions of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. 🙂
…or is it Global Warming caused by Global Cooling?
For the love of God! Could one of you global warming alarmists please tell me what it is you wish the climate would do? C’mon Weepy Bill. I know you watch this site. Thrill us.
..I would really be interested in knowing what ” The Perfect Temperature ” is for the Earth ..Surely, it cannot be -20 c….Which Nation / continent / government / society / warlord / despot…etc..gets to dictate ” what Mother MUST or MUST NOT do ?
Mother being Mother Earth ! ( some liberals are slow ) !
Everybody knows that everything that happens is due to Global Warming. Particularly the latest spate of earthquakes, solar flares from the sun, everyone has noticed the increase in meteor activity which is closely aligned to Global Warming. The latest research has shown that the price of the US Postal Service postage stamp correlates exactly with the rise in sea levels, fall in the number of Polar Bears and CO2. How can the Global Warming skeptics ignore the obvious?
.. Political Delusion !
I have a children’s picture book, a story of wild horses in the American West. It describes how many of the horses die of cold and starvation or are weakened enough to be taken by predators during the “white famine”–winter. And how much easier it is for them to live come Spring. Cold=bad, warm=good for livestock was once considered so obvious even a first-grader could easily understand it, so I have to conclude anyone who can be sucked into this silliness has never spent any time with animals, pastures, and the problems involved. You don’t get much of that in Park Avenue salons, after all.
I stubbed my toe on my coffee table this evening. I think it was Climate Change that made the dimensions of my coffee table change ever so slightly . Sure, it’s not measurable, and the measurements I do have aren’t really accurate or consistent – but it was clearly Climate Change. We must cut CO2 immediately!
Oh, and give me a few million as compensation for my bad accident because of Climate Change.
Rasa wrote: “The latest research has shown that the price of the US Postal Service postage stamp correlates exactly with the rise in sea levels,…”
I believe on April 10, 2016, U.S. 1st class postage goes down 2 cents to 47 cents.
Has anyone noticed that the motto of the U.S. Postal Service is now considered to be unfair working conditions by the union?
Oh no. Mongolians will start invading again! 😀
Did Al Gore visit Mongolia? Of course, overgrazing had nothing to do with herd failures, only weather.
Sorry to disappoint all you “deniers”, but the evidence is in. Look at the photo on the first page of article.
https://www.devex.com/news/for-mongolians-climate-change-is-as-personal-as-it-gets-87832.
There are five, (count em 5 !), SUVs parked outside of 3 yurts. Either Al Gore is visiting, or the Mongolians are just looking for trouble, hence they get worst side of global warming (i.e., the cold side of it).
/sarc
There are six SUVs. Count the shadows.
Count the shadows.
Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?
Odd that CAGW causes dzud, yet the Mongolian word dzud for these conditions has been in the language for hundreds of years. Mongolian yak herders must have had one heck of a good dung fired supercomputer climate model way back when, to have been so prescient as to name this CAGW disaster so much earlier than than there was any AGW, let alone dzud CAGW.
Transparently stupid warmunism.
..That what I said…more or less ! LOL
Looks like in Mongolia, CAGW is no longer just BS, it has morphed into Yak Manure.
Ah, but now it’s a CAduds! The “A” means we have to do something to control something!
(Or something like that.)
Meanwhile Africa is falling faster economically than Russia or the other oil producers because all commodities are down sharply (see WSJ story on Zambia). This highlights the disaster of the U.S. and international agency focus on renewable energy and climate change. It is about to surpass Rwandan genocide in scope. Demonstration projects in a collapsing society are not much help.
This weak attempt of propaganda only shows that the warmist media co-conspirators are getting really lazy.
Cold in Mongolia? Shocking!
Cold in Mongolia……Really?….. Who would have thought…
I hope Crispin from Waterloo is actually in Mongolia again and will confirm that all the livestock there has died because of the cold resulting from all the wicked Western people burning fossil fuels.
That lovely photo of the very neat and tidy Mongolian Yurt, with the snow covered mountains in the background, shows a tall chimney sticking out the top. These stoic folks get through the freezing cold winters by burning coal in their ingenious down-draught stoves, and I remember Crispin telling how they actually glow red-hot inside the yurt.
Now here in southern Africa we have been having a very bad drought and all over Namibia, Botswana and South Africa many thousands of livestock have died. But this is not new, and it has all happened before. Good years follow bad ones, as sure as day follows night, but nobody learns.
When the rains come, cattle people rejoice and build up their stock numbers, like money in the bank for them. As the cycle turns, the cattle become thin, which is the time to eat them and take the pressure off the land. But as everyone knows, you cant’t eat money, and so the whole sorry cycle is repeated. Nowadays this stupidity can be blamed on Global Warming, thus conveniently absolving presidents, princes, politicians and peasants alike from taking responsibility for the the wise management of the soil and ecosystems that support all life on earth.
Eric has become a champion poster of news and contributions to WUWT – thanks for that and strength to your arm.
John4150
I am in Central Asia these days working on keeping people warm as usual. The stoves that have cleaned up the air of Ulaanbaatar are mostly TLUD’s (top-lit updraft) stoves some designed locally, some from Turkey. The air quality has improved 65% in 4 years caused only by replacing the ger stoves (yurt stoves). Now they are starting on the low pressure boilers.
Here in Bishkek everyone but everyone has a water heating stove of some kind except way up in the mountains. In the rural areas of Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Mongolia they burn dung or co-fire it with branches or wood or crop residues. The stoves used for this purpose are quite different (and should be) from the coal burners in the cities.
The development of advanced downdraft stoves continued through the Univ of JHB’s SeTAR Centre. A TLUD coal burner was constructed last week in Tajikistan to demonstrate what smokeless coal combustion looks and feels like. Very impressive, they decided. $32.
“I’m not a scientific expert, but in my personal experience, the changes [to the environment] are evident,”
Maybe he should look at this NOAA graphic to see that there are no straight lines or any regular shapes anywhere. This would indicate that weather patterns will also not follow precise predictability anywhere.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/map/images/fnl/sfctmp_01.fnl.gif
Yes, and the bulk of the coldest weather is right over Hudson Bay, the epicenter of all Ice Ages.
What if this is a precursor to a new mini ice age?
Does the solar activity look like it did during the Maunder Minimum and if so what is the strength of the correlation between solar activity and temperature?
What is the current theory as to how solar activity influences global temperatures (if it in fact does)?
Thanks,
-Walt
Walt, shhh, do you want to start a fight?
Seriously, the short answer is we do not know, but time will tell. Climate is affected by many disparate factors over vastly different time scales. some decently understood, some not so much. How they coalesce over what frequency, strengthening or weakening each other, is what makes it interesting.
Just stick around for a few years. We’ll all find out together. As for temperature correlation, think of the temperature swings each day and night.
Over the next 48 hours its certainly looking like Mongolia will be getting colder.
As its looking like a icy blast will be coming down from the Arctic over that part of the world in the next 2 days. Talking of icy blasts, the weather pattern setting up over europe going into next week is looking interesting. Where europe may well get a little taste of what a ice age weather pattern can do.
Never underestimate a warmunists’ ability to confuse weather with climate, fact with fiction, or a logical argument with an Appeal to Emotion.
When “science” becomes PR, such stories is what you get. And when it’s PR, somebody is selling something.
Or stealing.
Like democracy.
Auto.
Global warmists, please, please don’t stop. Don’t stop blaming every major snow storm on global warming. Please don’t stop blaming every tornado on global warming. Please keep claiming that the reduction in the Arctic ice pack and the growth in the Antarctic ice pack are due to global warming. Keep saying that every strange fish that washes up on any beach is due to global warming. Please tell us that crops are failing when we see ever increasing surpluses. Oh please keep it all up.
Yes, please keep telling us to believe you…and not our own lying eyes. Why, because the general public, the scientifically uneducated, ever gullible, general public is starting to catch on to your chicken little claims.
dam1953.
Don’t worry the grant gravy train will keep pumping out the money no matter how the economy is in trouble = DEFICIT FINANCING will keep the crooks and cooks in business.
The Democrat enablers Clinton and Sanders said as much last night on the CNN debate!
God help us if these warmist get in the white house.
Edits..
Crooks, cooks and kooks… ( I like triple rhymes)
And what do you mean “if these warmists get in the White House”? Who the hell do you think is in there now? We have have had the far left wing of the left wing running the show for the past 7+ years. It’s a veritable granola valley up there, filled with fruits, nuts and flakes.
Eric,
A couple of decades ago I pointed out that frequent dzud (zud back then) occurrences, that froze your livestock to the ground would not be conducive for building up the vast herds of horses that gave the Mongolians the mobility to conquer a large portion of the known world in the 12th and 13th centuries. I suggested that this indicated that Mongolia was located in Europe during the middle ages because everyone “knows” the Medieval Warm Period only occurred in Europe and the North Atlantic.
Jeff.
I never stop learning thanks to great contributors like yourself.
That’s a very interesting point/ a real historical eye-opener, so the Medieval Warming Period created the conditions and climate to allow the Mongolians to prosper grow abundant crops/ food and livestock for their great conquests. It makes sense since the Medieval Warming Period shows lots of signals worldwide as well as in the southern latitudes. The warmist fanatics hate that!
TG,
They really do hate it. I recently read a paper claiming that the Mongol horde was fleeing a colder climate thereby proving the MWP wasn’t global.
JN, terrific observation. Great MWP sound bite.
Jeff..
My reading on that incredible period of history all roads lead back to Mongolia during and after the major conquest (Amazing history) The treasures and the artisans/ builders and trades people flocked to Mongolia to get in on the act and wealth creation.
The warmist stuck out again, or are they now change a well-recorded history of those times!
if it isn’t falsifiable it isn’t science. This article is just absolutely embarrassing.
What if it’s fashionable? Much of what is reported is fashionable. Maybe Popper got it wrong.
“Mongolia’s average warming over the past couple of years is 2.2 degrees Celsius, which is considered the hottest in the country since the 1940s, and the global average is at 0.8 degrees Celsius,”
“Since November 2015, large parts of the country have been experiencing very low temperatures of up to minus 40 degree Celsius, followed by heavy snowfall that has covered around 90 percent of Mongolia’s territory.”
Only the magic power of CAGW could bridge the factual gap between these two statements.
I’ve been watching it on here –
http://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/overlay=temp/orthographic=96.26,58.32,277/loc=109.851,50.917
for the last few mths, lots of -30°C & -40°Cs: it’s now warmed up…..to -20°C !!
But it would be warmer if it wasn’t for global warming!
(No need to thank me for clearing your logical error.8-)
only some biased twit could also fail to mention the prior 4 years that Mongolian herders have lost thousands of animals due to the deep snows n inability to provide fodder
iceagenow.info has been reporting on these events and others for years.
(and the 4yrs back is only from when I started taking notice of reports)
Forget about all the statements. As usual problems are mixed up with climate hysteria. Mongolia has around 3 million people and who knows 30 to 50 million ruminants who convert the country in a desert. This is supported by the fact that all animals are on equal position as humans in the countries constitution. So, when an animal suffers undernourishment, the government has to feed it, not the owner. Land is all communal. Nobody slaughters an animal when it has good meat quality, just when it is needed to pay the bills. In the dzud, which is a common weather condition since centuries, the animals are starving to death and the government of Mongolia will buy hay in Russia to feed the crowd. The crowd could have been slaughtered and would have, as in all other normal animal husbandry, if food for the animal would have a cost factor. This is a common thing since Soviet times. Now comes the funny part, climate change, sorry for you Mongolians, is not happening. If it would happen, you would be the big winners, because the stepps and grasslands would profit and the potential of the land would see an immense growth and your love to animals could increase some more millions of goats, sheep and other hairy friends.
Mongolia will need more and more heating in the coming two decades. That is why I have devoted the last ten years to improving the local capacity to build more efficient heating appliances. Fortunately they have a trillion tons of coal, much of it easy-to-light lignite that burns incredibly cleanly in stoves designed for it.
If they already have a name for the phenomenon it must have happened many times in history.
About what I was going to say. No win argument for those who question, no lose argument for those who have drunk the koolaid.
Reblogged this on Climatism and commented:
Hot, cold, wet, dry, blizzard, drought, wind, rain, snow or ice….it’s all ‘global warming’ and it’s all-your-fault!
maybe they can blame warming for the cold but they can’t blame fossil fuel emissions for the warming
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2725743
Lean Alfred Santos is right: the climate is changing. But like some, he’d be well inspired to understand meteorology before blabbing such ridiculous claim that it is a result of global warming.
The mean annual surface pressure in the Gobi desert has been rising since the 1960s while the temperature has steadily declined. (CDC/NCEP-NCAR data in Leroux 2010 page 382).
That means more powerful anticyclonic conditions are affecting the region, not because air comes down from the sky, but because of colder travelling polar air masses descending southward to the Himalayas, hence the summer drought, the low temperatures in winter and occasionally some heavy precipitation during transitional season. If anything these conditions are compatible with those experienced during cooling periods.
And yes, warming during summer and extreme cold are of course compatible statements since both result of those anticyclonic conditions.
Sounds like these folks need some buffalo (bison) which will grow fat in areas that cattle, sheep, and goats will starve in. Sheep are somewhat of a problem since they graze the grass so short they kill the plants.
Last winter the flow was very meridienal at times, and there were plenty of headlines about the cold getting farther south than usual, if you checked out that “Ice Age Now” site. In January my site, which is suppose to focus on arctic sea-ice, kept getting sidetracked to the weather in places like Thailand and Africa. The cold in Thailand came south by way of Mongolia, of course.
https://sunriseswansong.wordpress.com/2016/01/27/arctic-sea-ice-the-return-of-the-nudger/
Currently the loopy flow may have some warmth surging north in the east of USA (which the mainstream media will report) but at the same time it is snowing way down in the mountains of central Mexico, (which only “Ice Age Now” will report).
Here is one of Dr. Ryan Maue’s excellent maps from the Wearherbell Site, showing the forecast snows in the west over the next week, and how they extend way down into Mexico. Remind yourself this isn’t the dead of winter. This is not January. For it to be that cold in Mexico in March simply must be due to Global Warming . /sarc.
Ah Yes perhaps the reason for the colder weather in Mongolia is due to the same phenomenon that the BBC was reporting as the cause for the current cold snaps – SSW – Sudden Stratospheric Warming. It beggars belief that these people get paid for this nonsense. Find a cold weather pattern and find some adjacent warming and then blame the cooling on the warming – easy case proved. However maybe the SSW is the result of the polar Vortex.
Why not claim that sudden cooling causes stratospheric warming…….perhaps its just plain bad science (sarc)
Nothing says warming like cooling. 🙂
I had some fun during a heat-wave last summer headlining a post about snows in Hawaii and Africa.
https://sunriseswansong.wordpress.com/2015/07/19/july-snow-in-hawaii-and-africa/
If you can’t beat them, join them (and reduce things to absurdity).
The Mongolians have it worked out. No matter what the problem, blame climate change and wait for a share of the $100bn.
I’m glad we’re not experiencing the onset of the next Ice Age, or we’d be having overwhelming heat waves of genocidal proportions.
/sarc
Mongolia needs to move itself west a bit.
http://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/ch_tlt_2016_02_anom_v03_3.png
I notice in the caption to the lead photograph the structure is called a “Mongolian Yurt”. Mongolians would not take kindly to that as a Yurt is Russian, in Mongolia they are known as Ghers.
Was there a few years ago in early May and there was a couple of days where we had that fluffy solid global warming falling from the sky.
Alan, not to quibble but they spell it ‘ger’ and it is pronounced that way because ‘gh’ is a different sound. It may appear as gher in other transliterations. A ger is a highly sophisticated piece of technology that can be set up in 90 minutes and taken down in 45. It can be transported by 5 mature camels, the minimum number needed by a poor family.
And you are right about the fluffy warming stuff. I think there is no day of the year it never snowed.
Up list there is a mention of a 90% coverage in snow. That is amazing because a large portion of Mongolia is desert where is basically never has precipitation.
If global warming causes global cooling, isn’t that evidence of “The Great Global Thermostat”? Seems to me that CO2 atmospheric temperature forcing is a self-eating watermelon (as anyone should have long since concluded from studying the reconstructed history of 500,000 years of global temperature).
Mongolian Throat Singing
The drought and snows have been happening periodically since the time of Genghis Khan.
As with Genghis they have to face the same problem for a nation of herders, grazing.
This is just like the Zimbabwe scam, scandalously bad management blamed on climate. Lets blame global warming for the great swathes of dry Russian steppe that gets bloody hot in summer and bloody cold in winter. I suppose global warming created the Gobi desert too.
Mongolia is not rich, like the Maldives and are only happy to accomodate this kind of nonsense to get stuck into the UN green fund
Overgrazing leaves barren dry land as even grass roots are eaten and done over a large area to that degree leaves more or less barren land with sparse growth. Rise and repeat and you have a grazing problem.
The Mongolian steppe seen decades of drought in the 12th century along with cold winters. It was very arid in that period. The same thing happens with the Russian open steppe. Hot dry summers followed by severe winters, just ask the Germans as they tried to make their way through in the 40s.
One method taken up by the Mongols was heating bricks on fires and putting them under animal skins to sleep on to fight the cold.
Mongolia then got very wet in the following decades with a huge increase in precipitation by 1213
Now according to Tenberth, Mongolia should be seeing less drought in a warmer and wetter world, yet Mongolia has not seen as much rain as in the thirteenth century.
Isn’t Mongolia the final refuge of a species of Camel that is able in winter to derive all it’s water by eating snow and ice? As I understand it that is a pretty specific adaptation to harsh winters and that ordinary ruminates would die of dehydration or frostbite without that adaptation of the digestive system. Makes one think that very cold extends into prehistory in that area of the world.
There was a recent (1990’s) excavation of an Altai burial site in Mongolia. The woman was buried c. 500 BC and was known as the Siberian Ice Maiden. She was completely frozen and contact with air began the process of disintegration. She was buried with her horses and had tattoos. These people have lived this way for thousands of years. They make beautiful curved iron bits and tack for their animals and live in these yurts.
http://horsetalk.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/altai-mountains.jpg
What I want to point out is that the documentary on the Altai woman makes shameless claims for the loss of these frozen burial sites because of Global Warming. Of course this casts the academics raiding graves as the heroes preserving the past. The true threat to the destruction of their way of life as keepers of fine domesticated animals is political, because they are free nomads. The weather they have always suffered, but it is help from this generation of know-it-alls in the West that they would not survive. Alas I think I will not either, but it has been a good life thank God.
“The Ice Maiden’s tomb was found on the Ukok Plateau near the border of China, in what is now the Autonomous Republic of Altai. The plateau, part of the Eurasian Steppes, is characterized by a harsh, arid climate. The area is known by the local people as the “second layer of heaven,” one step above ordinary people and events.[2] Present day Altai herdsmen still bring their sheep and horses to the plateau during winter because the fierce wind blows the snow off the grass and provides grazing land for the animals despite the freezing temperatures.”
Correction:
“Of course this casts the academics raiding graves for gold and antiquities as the heroes preserving the past. The true threat to their way of life as keepers of fine domesticated animals is political, because they are free nomads. The weather they have always suffered, but it is help from this generation of know-it-alls in the West that they would not survive.” Thank you.
Forgot how to talk.